{Infographic} Top 5 Most Talked About Super Bowl Commercials on Social Media

For a marketer, the Super Bowl is the pinnacle of getting the word out about your company. It’s lovingly referred to as the Brand Bowl by those who prefer to watch commercials over football. While everyone has their favorite ads, the question is what ads generated the most buzz? Tracking data on Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress, we were able to determine what were the top 5 most talked about Super Bowl commercials on social media.

Inforgraphic: Super Bowl commercials on social media

Smart brands helped facilitate the conversation online by including hashtags such as the #solongvampires tag from Audi. In fact, it was the most popular hashtag we tracked related to commercials yesterday and today. The next most popular was #makeitplatinum by Budweiser but it only had approximately half the usage of the vampires hashtag. Having a social media presence that was well known to customers was important in generating buzz too. As a brand, the @Pepsi Twitter handle received the most mentions. The next most at replies went to athlete @deionsanders who was in two Super Bowl commercials.

Deion Sanders wasn’t the only celebrity to make the rounds multiple times. Jay Leno was in a commercial for both his show and the Acura NSX. Adriana Lima, known for selling Victoria Secret underwear, also helped promote Kia and Teleflora. Darth Vader was featured in an ad for Volkswagen and his upcoming return to movie theaters in 3D. The musical group LMFAO was featured in multiple commercials and the half time show. We set up different sets of rules to track which commercials they would be associated with.

For social media, having a well known celebrity helped keep the social media mentions coming. For GI Joe, mentions of The Rock were 10X the mentions of GI Joe. Obviously, for H&M being the #1 talked about commercial was in large part due to David Beckham and he tracked for significantly more coverage than the brand generated. Celebrities give something for people to talk about while brands such as Hyundai had less remarkable components of their ad to comment on in social media. In some cases, the celebrities might not be who you think they are, while Jerry Seinfeld was huge for Acura, the Soup Nazi had nearly as many shout outs as Jerry.

You didn’t have to have a Super Bowl commercial to have a strong social media presence on game day. In fact, while Apple didn’t run a Super Bowl ad, they received enough social media mentions to rank among the top Super Bowl advertisers for the day. This is due to their continually strong brand presence on social media.

Interestingly, while the most popular commercials resonated at similar levels for both Facebook and Twitter – there was one significant difference. On Twitter, the Acura NSX with Jerry Seinfeld commercial was significantly more popular than the Honda commercial with Ferris Bueller. While on Facebook, they received similar levels of mentions.